What it is: Google rocks my socks. The good people at Google that are dreaming up ways to change the world never cease to amaze me. Today, new to Google Labs is a little tool called Swiffy. Swiffy let’s you upload a SWF file (otherwise known as Flash) and convert it to HTML5. Sweet. This means that you can use flash content on devices without a Flash player (i.e. iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch). You know what that means? The iDevices are officially the PERFECT device thanks to Google. (No need for the list of reasons you don’t like iDevices, I’m a hardcore fan and you are not likely to change my mind with a rant. Deal? Deal.) Swiffy works directly from your web browser, I have tried it out in Firefox, Safari and Chrome. It worked in all three well! It will also work from Mobile Safari which means it will work from your iDevice. Very handy. Using Swiffy is as easy as uploading a file and clicking “upload and convert”. It couldn’t be easier.
How to integrate Swiffy into the classroom: When I was in college I had a professor that often said “The wheels of academia are SLOW to turn.” She couldn’t have been more correct. I have seen this in nearly every arena of education. Technology is no exception. Many wonderful resources are available as flash files. The problem? iDevices (the iPad, iPod Touch) are becoming more frequently used in the classroom and they are not flash friendly. Google labs comes to the rescue with Swiffy. Simply upload the flash file and convert it to HTML 5 using Swiffy. The new HTML5 files can be distributed to student devices so that learning can continue uninterrupted by something silly like file type. Very cool.
Tips: SWF 5 currently gives the best results. If possible save the SWF file this way!
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Swiffy in your classroom!
Thanks for sharing this. It sounded like a great tool, but I just tried it with about 40 different SWFs I had made. Only 2 of them could be converted successfully. The SWF has to be /extremely/ basic for the conversion to work.
All in all, I think the i-devices either need to support Flash or we need to simply stop using them. I am a programmer as well as an educator and the simple fact is that Flash is a great tool for quickly and cheaply developing applications. There are other alternatives that support Flash well (oftentimes far more cost-effective than their Apple-branded equivalents).
Yes, Flash can be rather inefficient and it eats battery power fast, but it’s fast and cheap for development so a lot of textbook companies write learning modules in Flash instead of wasting loads of money on writing separate mobile versions. Google Swiffy would be great for helping to fix some of the wasteful, unnecessary uses of Flash (like using a whole Flash file just to display a company logo or a couple plain-text links). However, it’s impossible to get the same functionality and ease-of-deployment from HTML5 as you can get in Flash right now.
Chris, definitely some work to be done on it! I had success with several that I uploaded but I didn’t make them so I don’t know the ins and outs of what made those work. I’m hopeful that this tool will catch on and more work will be done to make it more useful on a regular.